Tuesday, May 18, 2010

Last week, I noted a report saying that urban kids had "a human-centered pattern of reasoning," but rural kids did not. Today we learn that these urban kids (actually different urban kids) learn this perspective between the ages of 3 and 5. "... 3-year-olds showed no hint of anthropocentrism."

The EurekAlert article about is strange in one way. It says, "This outcome, considered in conjunction with recent cross-cultural evidence including Native American children, suggests a new model of development: Human-centered reasoning is not an obligatory starting point for development, as researchers and educators had previously assumed."

But the "recent cross cultural evidence including Native American children" also included White rural kids, who tested the same as the Native Americans, so the cultures the study found differences between were urban and rural, not White and Native American.